Vine Doesn't Have a Porn Problem, You Do

Twitter introduces a new app that allows human beings to share six seconds of video on their iPhones, and what does it expect we’re going to do with it?

We might share a clip of the neatly garnished food on our plate when we eat out, and maybe we’ll snip a few seconds of smoke-smothered concert footage here and there, but we’re definitely going to take some video of our genitalia. It’s simply what humans have a long and storied track record of doing, and will likely continue to do as new and innovative media platforms continue to provide us with new and innovative ways to do it.

So, Twitter must have anticipated that its new Vine app would run into the problem of six-second amateur porn clips getting tossed around and RT’d faster than a tweenage Bieber truth-blast.

But maybe it didn’t anticipate the porn being this much of an issue. The news today is that a six-second clip of someone playing with a dildo made it to the top of the ‘Editor’s picks’ pile, where it was viewable by anyone and everyone who’d downloaded the app. That's a problem.

Not because Twitter will have to work to keep porn off the Editor’s Picks section and out of the spotlight, necessarily—they’ll surely be able to manage that going forward, I hope—but because the wave of porn-fueled publicity is now going to force Apple, which is known for its stringent-if-capricious App Store policy guidelines, to decide whether or not to oust it or at least demand that Twitter trim the vine some, so to speak.

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.